The world of hierarchy, war, and women’s subjugation are connected. No news there. They are also widely tolerated (if not celebrated outright) in many fantasy novels. Even really amazing women writers who put striking female characters at the center of their work often can’t escape the vortex of martial splendor, feudal social structures, and the…
Category: novel musings
The Half-Life of a Revolt
The uprising that inspired Hyperadamantine, though only a passing note in many Western histories of Russia, has had a remarkably long half-life for a so-called “failure.” The uprising led to something of a lost generation among Russian nobility: Some of the boldest and most liberal-minded aristocrats were exiled. They weren’t silenced, though: When the wave of…
A Novel History
“You’re a historian. Why write a novel?” a dear friend and early reader of Hyperadamantine wanted to know. Why indeed? Like many academics, in the course of looking for something else, I stumbled across the name Nikolai Bestuzhev a lot, as I researched culture and society in 19th– and 20th-century Buryatia for a dissertation. Just…
t.newyear, novelist 